TextExpander 5 adds support for JavaScript snippets, which can be run on all of your devices – Macs, iPads, and iPhones. Here is a sample script which rounds the current date to the nearest 5 minute interval:

TextExpander itself is scriptable via AppleScript and JavaScript for automation. User Vlad Ghitulescu wanted to create a large number of snippets for inserting the day and time in OmniFocus. For example, he wanted to type ",di09" and have it expand to "Dienstag 09:00". Did I mention that Vlad works in German? Anyway, we worked with him to create a script to build the group he needed:

The original script was written for use in German, so I've commented the German words and abbreviations and replaced them with their English equivalents. Feel free to swap the commenting if you'd prefer them in German, or feel free to change them for other languages.

Need to put a big red Draft stamp on a PDF, or a Sign Here arrow? PDFpen comes with stamps for just that purpose. The stamps are a type of imprint you can place on your document that is new to version 7 of PDFpen and PDFpenPro and version 2 of PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.

There are three categories of stamps to choose from, which you will notice when you open the Library window (⌘Y) to the stamps tab. You won't see these separate categories in PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.

Sign here style arrowed stamps

Business stamps for things like Paid, Copied, Approved

Dynamic stamps for when you need the current date and time in the stamp

There is a fourth category, and that is User Defined. This is where you can make your own custom stamps. (Making stamps is Mac-version only).

Make a Stamp

Click on the + at the lower left corner of the Library window and choose “Add Custom Stamp.”

In the Add Custom Stamp Window, you have a few customizations to make :

label, or, what the stamp will say

type (Dynamic, Sign Here or Standard Business)

color scheme

Click OK to finish and this stamp will be listed in User Defined.

Here are a few sample pictures of what different stamp options look like:

If you want something more customized than that, you could create something in your graphics app of choice and then import it into the Library by clicking the + in the lower left of the window and choosing Add File. It would be a static image, so no current date and time, and it would be listed in the Custom tab. You might want something like this for your company logo, for example.

If you purchased PDFpen from the Mac App Store then you can use iCloud to sync these stamps over to PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.

As always, if you have any tips or tricks of your own, let us know and we'll share it.

The Smile Team made it to WWDC this year, and to the other two conferences in SF the same week. We’re looking forward to what iOS 9 and El Capitan will bring later this year, as are you.

Here’s what our developer on the ground, Éric, noticed from within the walls of WWDC:

There was a palpable sense of relief when talking to most of the developers at the conference after they took stock of the keynote announcements. Indeed, it seems that this year’s OS releases are a bit less about broad and sweeping changes such as iOS 7’s UI redesign or last year’s addition of a multitude of OS extension mechanisms and more about incremental refinements of the platforms. While there were still plenty of exciting new features and announcements to be found (split-screen multitasking support for the iPad, system-wide Search API on iOS, a revamped and much-improved Notes application, Swift 2 going open source), it seemed that there’s going to be a little more breathing room for developers to keep pace with Apple’s platform advancements this year.

Dub-Dub was not the only game in town. We helped sponsor the free alternative conference altConf for another year. It was bigger and better than ever, with two speaker tracks and room for 1000 people. As the wrap session said, this conference isn’t just to make better devs, it’s to make better people. There are conferences to make you better at CoreData and Swift and Playgrounds, and then there are conferences that remind you why you do what you do and to stoke that passion for another year. We, and others who support AltConf, believe you need both. Yet another conference joined Dub-Dub week, Layers the design conference. As MC and conference co-founder Jessie Char said, this conference was all about hearing from her favorite designers while eating all her favorite foods. Plus new-version Photoshop sneak peaks. To misquote her further, who doesn’t love that?

App Camp 4 Girls had a successful party to start off Camp 3.0 Indiegogo campaign. Take a page from the App Camp play book if you want to keep your crowd engaged. Play Social Bingo so that everyone asks around to see who plays guitar and who flew in from Canada.

To finish off the week, on Conference Day 5, we had a Smile Team wrap party. This is one of the few times a year a large group of get together.

(Éric, Angel, Yunor, Kelly, Maia, Nat, Philip)

Hope you enjoyed happy hour. We had pizza and caipiranas. Now, we’re off to make PDFpen and TextExpander ready for the fall OSs.

What:

As you type, TextExpander will let you know what you type the most, and suggest you make it into a snippet.

You may have noticed these suggestions appearing in the corner of your screen through Notification Center.

Where:

To locate these suggested snippets open the TextExpander window to the “Suggested Snippets” group.

How:

Keep, drop, or delete the suggestions:

Keeping a suggestion means adding an abbreviation to it to complete the snippet. You can then move it into another group for better organization. Click the “Keep” button to keep it.

Dropping a suggestion means that TextExpander will never, ever, suggest it again. This is not the same as deleting a suggestion. Click the “Drop” button to drop it.

Deleting a suggestion means you remove that suggestion. TextExpander may suggest that same snippet again. Select the suggestion then press the Delete key to delete it.

Notifications:

To receive these notifications, open TextExpander’s Preferences > Suggestions and check the suggest snippets option.

If you want to keep the suggests coming, but have fewer of them, drop the ones you know you don’t want, they’ll never come back. Don’t delete suggestions you really don’t want, they could come back as new suggested snippets.

If you don’t want to receive these notifications at all, uncheck the option. However, in version 5.0, you will still receive some notifications on your pending suggested snippets. We do plan to address this in the next update.

The future:

Now that this feature is out in the wild we’re getting great feedback. With some time to reflect, we’ll work on fine tuning the suggestions.

A few ideas we’re tossing around for future settings would allow users to set the minimum length of a suggestion, limit suggestions to phrases only, or to avoid suggestions that are dictionary words.

Wrap-up

Keep your suggestions to us coming! Your feedback is invaluable in shaping TextExpander.

A few days have passed since the release of TextExpander 5.0, so it’s time to share what we’ve learned from this release.

Upgrade Overlay

This is our first paid upgrade to use the new upgrade overlay. We made an error in testing, so it shows Version 500 (like 5.0.0) rather than Version 5. We got some well-deserved ribbing from users about this mistake.

The overlay ensures that users know TextExpander 5 is a paid upgrade so that they don't reflexively hit “Install Update” without reading the update text. This has helped us avoid a lot of anger, confusion, and support mail which arises when a user unintentionally updates to a paid upgrade, as was rather common with PDFpen 7.

Some users have reported the overlay nags them. The overlay only appears when the update window is shown. To avoid it, reduce the checking frequency in the Update preferences, or turn off update checking altogether.

Cutoff Date Typo

The cutoff date for free upgrades is January 1, 2015. Due to an error integrating localizations, we show the cutoff date from TextExpander 4 in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. The software enforces the correct date, but the display reflects the typo. Most users figured this out on their own, and some wrote for support which allowed us to clarify. We’re sorry for this, and we’ll fix this in our next update.

Error when moving settings file

The worst issue we’ve encountered is that in some cases, OS X failed to recognize our new file extensions (.textexpandersettings and .textexpanderalias). Users experienced this as an “Unknown error when moving settings file” when trying to save their settings to a new location in the Sync preferences. Fortunately, the workaround is easy. Use a tool such as Cocktail or Onyx to rebuild the Launch Services database. Or, delete and re-download TextExpander 5, which apparently forces OS X to update its Launch Services entry for TextExpander.

Display and default font size preferences aren’t saved

If a user sets the display font size for plain text or the default font size for formatted text, this won’t be saved when they quit and re-launch TextExpander. This bug will be fixed in our next update.

Dock covers purchase window

Some users report they’ve been unable to purchase because the Dock covers the buttons at the bottom of the purchase window. The workaround is to temporarily check “Automatically hide and show the Dock” in the Dock pane of System Preferences. We’ll fix this in our next update.

JavaScript for Automation (JSA) scripts return extra newline

These are executed via the osascript terminal command, and it appears that command always adds a newline to its output. We will strip that newline in a future update. In the meantime, you can ‘wrap’ a JSA script in a shell script to strip the newline character:

#!/bin/bash
echo -n "%snippet:jsjs%" | tr -d '\n'

Secure Input Notification

Many users have noted that the Secure Input notifications are too frequent or intrusive and have asked for an option to turn them off. We expect to provide that in a future update. Here’s more info on secure input, if you’re interested.

Plain text password suggestions

When an app requests a password without secure input enabled, TextExpander is able to observe and thus suggest the text. An example of this would be Terminal. Apparently, OS X can’t detect when Terminal is requesting a password. That’s why Terminal has an option in its menu to toggle Secure Keyboard Entry. TextExpander excludes Terminal from Suggestions by default. We can’t control how other apps handle passwords, but they certainly shouldn’t allow themselves to be observed by user-authorized key loggers, such as TextExpander.

If a plain text password appears in TextExpander’s Suggested Snippets group, you can select it and choose “Drop Suggestion” to ensure that it is never suggested again. We expect to update our FAQ in a future release with more detail and recommendations.

TextExpander 5.0 and TextExpander 3.5 add support for JavaScript snippets. JavaScript includes a very nice math library, so in addition to having snippets which run on both OS X and iOS, there are a number of snippets which are easier to write. Here are some examples of snippets you can make by setting the Content: menu of a new snippet to JavaScript, and pasting the following into the editor:

When expanded, the user is prompted for their birth date, and the snippet returns their zodiac sign. For example, if the user enters 1972, the snippet expands to "Your Zodiac sign is the rat."

Note:
Did you notice %filltop%? That tells TextExpander to duplicate any single line and popup fields at the top of the fill-in window and hide the script. You'll find that via the insert menu under Fill-ins > Show at top.

Content Object

TextExpander includes a JavaScript context object, which exposes the following items you might find useful. Precede these with TextExpander, for example, TextExpander.appendOutput("Hello, world!").

triggeringAbbreviation - the abbreviation which triggered the expansion [boolean, read/write]ignoreOutput - do not use the final statement as the expansion [boolean, read/write]appendOutput(text) - add text to the expansion [function]baseDate - date and time at which the snippet is expanded [date, read only]adjustedDate - date and time used to expand the snippet [date, read/write]pasteboardText - clipboard contents [string, read/write]expansionContext - bundle ID within which snippet is being expanded [string, read only; can be nil]filledValues - fill-in field values [associative array of strings, read/write]

JavaScript for iOS and OS X

You can take advantage of JavaScript support on both OS X and iOS to create snippets which run on both platforms — something you can't do with AppleScripts and Shell Scripts. You can write a snippet to make the clipboard content lowercase in JavaScript like this:

TextExpander.pasteboardText.toLowerCase();

JavaScript for Automation

On OS X, you can use JavaScript for Automation (JSA) as an alternative to AppleScript. This form of JavaScript will not function in iOS. TextExpander should automatically detect JSA, or you can force JavaScript to be treated as JSA by starting it with a comment: //JSA

Here is a JSA script to create a new message, set its subject, and set its content:

Free upgrades are available via the TextExpander 5 application to those who purchased version 4 on or after January 1, 2015.

Upgrade by downloading TextExpander 5. Launch it, and it will tell you if your upgrade is free or paid. If it's paid, click "Buy an upgrade license."

TextExpander 5 requires OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later.

What's New in Version 5:

Suggests snippets from phrases you habitually type

Reminds you of missed opportunities to use your abbreviations

Customize snippet file location

Sync via iCloud Drive or any sync folder

Simplified expansion of lengthy fill-ins and scripts

Search and expand snippets, abbreviations, and suggestions inline as you type

Preview expanded snippet

Refreshed statistics display

Supports JavaScript snippets that also operate on iOS

Updated for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite (required)

Upgrading?

Setup New Sync:

Sync with any syncing folder.

Open TextExpander to Preferences > Sync.

Click Save Snippets As…

Choose a location on your hard drive to store your snippets. If you choose a syncing folder, then your snippets will sync.

Update your other devices:

On your second Mac open TextExpander to Preferences > Sync. On an iOS device open TextExpander's Settings to Sync Snippets.

Click on Link To Snippets…

Locate your Settings.textexpandersettings file and select it.

If you have an older version of TextExpander for Mac (4 or earlier) or TextExpander touch (3.2.4 or earlier), then you need to keep using the Older Version Dropbox sync by clicking Sync with TextExpander 4…

Setup Inline Search:

Can't remember snippets? Use search. It's more convenient to use than before.

Open TextExpander to Preferences > Hotkey.

Click the Click to Set Hotkey button next to Inline Search.

Press your preferred hotkey combo. (Note: hotkey combinations must include Command, Option, Control and/or Shift plus any character or number key.)